I finally tried Strata40, a won­der­ful theme try­ing to give the user an inter­face as close to the Fire­fox 4 mock­ups as pos­si­ble. After set­ting it up and using this theme as an excuse to get rid of Tab Mix Plus even though it’s a very con­ve­nient exten­sion. Unfor­tu­nately, doing with­out TMP means los­ing some func­tion­al­ity I’m totally used to. To com­pen­sate for that I installed Last­Tab which allows tab nav­i­ga­tion in a most recently used man­ner. That’s the easy part.

Well, I’ve got­ten used to right-clicking on the tab bar and select­ing some tabs from the Recently Closed Tabs menu. Of course, that went over­board with TMP. So that’s where the Undo Closed Tabs But­ton comes in. I had to pull a com­pat­i­ble ver­sion from Google Code but even so the exten­sion really fucked the inter­face up. I went to my cur­rent pro­file direc­tory, opened the exten­sions folder and looked for this extension’s folder. Once found, I nav­i­gated to the chrome\skin sub­folder and opened tabbar.css in Notepad++. There I got rid of the -moz-binding:

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
/* .tabbrowser-tabs {-moz-binding:url("chrome://undoclosedtabsbutton/content/tabbarOverlay.xml#tabbrowser-tabs") !important;} */

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Ever since Mozilla has intro­duced Col­lec­tions I wanted to be able to install a com­plete col­lec­tion with one click. These add-on col­lec­tions cre­ated by Mozilla or users are dis­played on the Mozilla web­site but they do not pro­vide an easy way to install a com­plete set. Mas­sive Exten­der is going to change that. Mas­sive Exten­der is a brand new – read: exper­i­men­tal – add-on that extends Mozilla’s Add-on Col­lec­tor by adding batch install capabilities.

Every add-on in a col­lec­tion is included in batch actions by default. You just tick the check box of the exten­sions you’d like to add to your browser. The num­ber of exten­sions marked for instal­la­tion is dis­played in the lower right cor­ner of the header of the sub­scrip­tion win­dow atop the dis­played add-ons con­tained in the col­lec­tion. Now all you have to do is to click the Install but­ton and you’re done.

While this add-on may not serve any pur­pose dur­ing daily oper­a­tions it will cer­tainly come in handy after the instal­la­tion of Fire­fox or the cre­ation of a new pro­file. This is a won­der­ful idea! Mas­sive Exten­der will cer­tainly become part of my exten­sion. After all, it’s pos­si­ble to dis­able it if you don’t need it. What’s your take on this exten­sion? Will it become part of your add-on col­lec­tion too?

Over the last few days I’ve tried a new Fire­fox exten­sion called After the Dead­line. This exten­sion is a gram­mar, style, and spell checker which does a bet­ter job than the built-in proof­read­ing mech­a­nism in Fire­fox. Actu­ally, I’ve always con­sid­ered OSpell for Opera far supe­rior and I des­per­ately wanted the same fea­tures in Fire­fox. Until recently no exten­sion or user script could offer the same functionality.

With the intro­duc­tion of After the Dead­line things changed. It’s unob­tru­sive and it doesn’t slow down Fire­fox (Yes, I’ve already decreased the value of extensions.spellcheck.inline.max-misspellings to 50 or so). Any­way, AtD pro­vides a small icon in the lower right cor­ner of text areas which you click to check the text it con­tains. It also has a nice options dia­log and the lat­est ver­sion (1.11) fixes a few bugs. Check it out!

Dur­ing the last months I got ever more irri­tated by the pass­word man­ager imple­mented in Fire­fox. If you want secu­rity, you have to assign a mas­ter pass­word. Of course, you have to enter it at least once, if you want to make use of the man­ager directly or via inter­est­ing add-ons like Secure Login. This add-on adds a but­ton that acts sim­i­lar to Opera’s wand. Well, I didn’t much like Fire­fox’ pass­word man­ager because you would have to syn­chro­nize your data­bases if you need your pass­words in more than one loca­tion – at home and at work, for instance.

A few weeks ago, I stum­bled over a pass­word man­ager called Robo­Form. I didn’t have time to check it out back then, but I did today. And let me tell you: I like what I’m see­ing! After a lit­tle con­fig­u­ra­tion it works like a charm. All you have to do is to get an online stor­age ser­vice you’re going to use to sync files. That’s it, you’re done. Of course, you still have to enter your mas­ter pass­word once but that’s the price you pay for secu­rity. By the way, you don’t have to set a mas­ter password.

Any­way, Robo­Form stores and man­ages your pass­words, enters the infor­ma­tion auto­mat­i­cally or man­u­ally, and stores dif­fer­ent iden­ti­ties with lots of addi­tional infor­ma­tion. You can trust it with your credit card or bank­ing account infor­ma­tion. It’s quite flex­i­ble and easy to use. I already love it. Best of all, it’s free. Well, sort of. I won’t save much infor­ma­tion at all after the 30 day trial. Let’s see if I can get my hands on some­thing sim­i­lar or if I have to acquire some licenses. I know, I know, I could use KeeP­ass for free but this tool isn’t designed to act like a filler …

Fire­fox 3 has been released yes­ter­day – and all the down­load servers have been over­loaded in just a few min­utes. If you haven’t already down­loaded the over­hauled browser, you can do so here. Just in case you’re won­der­ing why you should upgrade I’ll present a few good rea­sons. The new Gecko 1.9 ren­der­ing engine and quite a lot of tweaks con­tribute to sig­nif­i­cant per­for­mance gains, i. e., it launches and runs much faster. The JavaScript inter­preter works faster too, and the browser deliv­ers an improved mem­ory han­dling. The new address bar, now dubbed Smart Loca­tion Bar, makes it eas­ier to find the sites you recently vis­ited, and allows for a bet­ter book­marks han­dling. The Book­mark Man­ager is now called Places Orga­nizer and is more intel­li­gent than ever before. Finally, the Down­load  and Add-On Mangers have become more pow­er­ful too. There are more fea­tures, of course, but these are the most impor­tant to me.

After installing it, I tried to get all my plug-ins to work. Luck­ily, ever exten­sion I have in use has already been upgraded to work with ver­sion 3.0 of Fire­fox, which has been in devel­op­ment for roughly 3 years. By the way, ver­sion 3.1 is already in the works and should be released at the end of the year. It will incor­po­rate a few fea­tures that didn’t make it into Fire­fox 3.0. As I was writ­ing, every exten­sion was avail­able for the new ver­sion – save one: Mouse Ges­tures, one of my favorites. A fast search on Google pro­vided a solu­tion to this par­tic­u­lar dilemma – Mouse Ges­tures Redox.

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The next iter­a­tion of the famous browser has been released to the open. It’s ver­sion 9.5 and it’s still in its alpha stage. Nev­er­the­less, it’s work­ing well and the browser indeed is incred­i­bly fast. Just how fast it really is can be seen on this site. Opera 9.5 (code-named Kestrel) doesn’t quite add enought fea­tures to jus­tify a ver­sion num­ber bump but con­tains some very wel­come improve­ments. It’s faster than ever before and Opera claims that the user inter­face has also received sig­nif­i­cant opti­miza­tions. The inte­grated Bit­Tor­rent client has been reworked and plenty of refine­ments have been added. More­over, there are new fea­tures like Syn­chro­niza­tion or Full His­tory Search. More­over, there’s full CSS3 support.

It’s a fine release and I really like it, even though it’s still an alpha. I tried Opera before but being a heavy Fire­fox user I couldn’t quite get myself accus­tomed to it. Things have changed now and I’d like to give you some assis­tance in using Opera, espe­cially if you’re used to Fire­fox. Read more…